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The Lord of the Fries

Today I bought a box of fries from The Lord of the Fries [1]. I bought it from their new stand at Flinders St station because I was going past and saw no queue. In the past I had considered buying from their store on Elizabeth St but the queues were too long.

The fries were nice – probably among the best fries that I’ve had from local fish and chip shops. Way better than any other fries that you can find in the center of Melbourne. The range of sauces is quite good if you like that thing (I just like vinegar on mine). However it should be noted that the quantity of chips that you would get for the same price at a local fish and chip shop is usually a lot greater.

Overall I was a bit disappointed, sure it’s nice to have someone hand-cut fresh potatoes and to actually care about making a quality product. But when compared to the other options for relatively fast food in the CBD it didn’t seem that great to me. I’m never going to join a queue that has more than 20 people to buy them! But I probably will buy from them on occasion if they don’t have big queues.

It seems to me that the best thing that they have done is to create a strong commitment to food quality and document it on their web site. I hope that this will inspire other fast-food companies to do the same thing and result in an overall increase in the food quality.

I’m guessing that both the shop and the card game were independently named after the book by William Golding. It seems likely that the chip selling people did a Google search on the name as a last step before registration and discovered the other company – but trademarks are specific to industry segments so they are clear in that regard.

I usually have plain white vinegar on my chips. I don’t know if the Lord of the Fries had some special vinegar on offer, it tasted much like any other vinegar.

While on the topic of different names, they should probably use the term “Frites” more as they are copying the Belgian way of cooking. The US Congress should have used the term “Belgian Frites” when they were having their hissy fit regarding France and rejecting the term “French Fries”.